R&D industry collaboration bringing ideas to the market

Category

News

Date

13 April 2016

Project

N/A

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) today announced nine cutting edge research and development (R&D) projects to be supported through its latest Industry-researcher collaboration R&D funding round.

Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt, Western Australia Minister for Energy Mike Nahan, LandCorp CEO Frank Marra and Curtin University Professor of Sustainability Peter Newman joined ARENA in Perth to mark the occasion.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the funding would create clear pathways for renewable energy technologies to move from the laboratory to field by fostering collaboration between research institutions and industry.

“The rich array of industry partners shows the breadth of sectors that will be involved in the transformation of Australia’s energy networks and systems.

“Research institutions will join the resources, agriculture, finance and property development industries to deliver the projects alongside utilities, power companies and renewable energy businesses.

“ARENA’s $17 million funding is leveraging substantial contributions from private and public sectors, with combined project values totalling more than $54 million. This will tap into our home-grown ingenuity and complement our existing portfolio of 144 R&D projects.”

Mr Frischknecht said the projects would ultimately aim to benefit businesses and consumers by integrating more renewables into our energy networks and industrial processes.

“The project led by Curtin University of Technology aims to unlock the potential of renewables in medium density strata developments while the University of Wollongong led one aims to develop a low-cost, high density sodium battery.

“University of Adelaide will lead a project to find out if solar thermal energy can be integrated into Alcoa’s alumina refining process and Queensland University of Technology will work with industry to explore how to produce biogas from sugarcane to further reduce the sugar industry’s fossil fuel use.

The Australian National University is leading three projects, one will develop a system to estimate the power produced by all the rooftop solar PV in a given area, another will look at how robots could capture data for solar installation diagnostics and the third will look at how battery storage and solar can solve network constraint problems on Bruny Island.

“The project led by the University of Western Australia will determine the optimum size and location of wave energy arrays and the University of South Australia led project will develop low cost phase change materials, which can store solar power for the industrial refrigeration market.”

A full list of project partners and complete profiles for each are available in the table below.